Illustrator

You know and (most likely) love the concept of one-click purchasing. This is a convenient way of buying something, isn’t it? Imagine the same principle ported to design work. One click and your plain text layout looks great. This is exactly what today’s Deal of the Week will bring you. Apply a plethora of retro text effects to even the most common (and boring) fonts and see the magic happen.

Should you expect to get a lifelong membership of Train Simple through this deal, you are totally right. Our Deal of the Week gives you the opportunity to gain lifetime access to the massive portfolio of official Adobe training videos for a friction of the original price. If this is too far into the future for you, buy a year’s membership, still massively discounted. If you find more than 5,400 online training videos covering Adobe’s product portfolio from A to Z attractive, you should definitely read on…

One of the best ways to improve your workflow and time management as a graphic design freelancer is to use apps. Not just any app will do, however. You need ones that won’t waste your time by crashing and that help you both on the go and when around your computer. Our collection of the best apps for graphic design freelancers below are divided into design and photography apps and business management apps. As a graphic designer, you never know when inspiration might hit, which is why you want something in place to record your idea before you lose it. And we all hate the annoying business tasks, especially when they take too much time away from designing. The apps below should help solve both of these problems that can occur for graphic design freelancers.

Wondering how to start working with Adobe Illustrator without getting overwhelmed by its endless possibilities? Then begin your acquaintance from tutorials that are aimed to fill the gaps of your knowledge. Nothing can be compared to this kind of educational material, especially when devoted graphic designers reveal their secrets and techniques. Of course, there are a considerable number of tutorials that cover everything from creating user interface templates to drawing character designs, and it is really difficult to make up your mind in which sphere to plunge in. However if you want to slowly but surely move in this direction, you should take your first steps with tutorials concerning text effects. These, at least as a rule, resort to simpler solutions based on basic tools and standard techniques. Besides, spending neither more nor less than an hour of your time you will be able to convert a plain lettering into something eccentric and innovative, having restyled the original typography completely. You can find tutorials that will help you obtain impressive results from a simple type by enlivening it with various mind-blowing yet easy-to-repeat effects. Ready? Let’s go…

Christmas, New Year’s Day, and Thanksgiving (in the US) are such big holidays in the winter that it can be easy to forget the smaller holiday that occur at the end of winter and into spring. Valentine’s Day is today, so we are little late for that, but we still have St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day, and even Memorial Day at the end of spring.

Mike Swanson, though having been aboard Microsoft for more than 11 years, has created a plugin for Adobe Ilustrator that resembles a good wine. The older it gets, the better it grows to be. More than two years ago, still employed at the Redmond company, Swanson pushed out the first version of AI -> Canvas. At that time HTML5 canvas was already of some prominence, but who would have dared to use the element in production environments? Today things look different, entirely different…

The world is not short of good causes and people who stand for them. Some of these causes are very prominent, practically omnipresent, while others could well use some more publicity. Now you have the chance to support a good cause you personally care lots about. With your help in terms of design you could earn your charity 1,000 Pounds/Euros. Corbis Images makes it possible with their brand-new contest “Make Your Mark – Design For A Cause”. If you know your way around Photoshop, Illustrator, Gimp, InkScape or whatever tool you see fit, this one is for you.

The following roundup of high-grade and elaborate Illustrator tutorials will not only satisfy the fans of vector-graphics. It is also bound to inspire the Photoshop artist. This is because a lot of the effects shown can be achieved using Photoshop as well, though in slightly different ways. You will definitely have your aha-moments here. The spectrum ranges from infographics over typography to posters and really lovely comic characters. Every designer will find his own favorite here.

Now and then different modern artists create artworks that force you to look at ordinary pictures in a whole new way. With a strong hint at the cubist style, polygonal art illustrations become extremely popular nowadays. Just like the old-school video games, this art direction inspires by exceptional interconnection between simple geometric forms, mainly with sharp corners and offbeat color combination. At first sight, every artwork is a giant collection of triangular shapes which recreates a feeling of depth and volume by means of light and dark tone of the same color that is used as a background. But if you take a closer look, you can definitely find circles, irregular polyhedra and segments with smooth lines that harmoniously complement each other and add slight touches of multilayerness.

In the following Adobe Illustrator tutorial you will learn how to create a set of sleek web ribbons. We’ll start with two simple shapes and some basic masking techniques. Next, using a simple rectangle and some simple vector shape building techniques we’ll create the overall ribbon shape. Once we have the starting shapes we’ll continue with the smaller parts. Using some Pathfinder options, several Warp and Gaussian Blur effects plus some basic…